The statements in this section merely provide background information related to the present disclosure. Accordingly, such statements are not intended to constitute an admission of prior art.
Vehicles having the ability to monitor an operator of a vehicle and detect that the operator is not paying attention to the road scene allow for measures to be taken to prevent a vehicle collision due to the operator not paying attention. For instance, warning systems can be enabled to alert the driver that he or she is not paying attention. Further, automatic braking and automatic steering systems can be enabled to bring the vehicle to a stop if it is determined that the driver has not become attentive even after being warned.
It is known to utilize driver-monitoring camera devices configured to monitor a driver and detect an Eyes-Off-the-Road (EOR) condition indicating that the driver's eyes are not on the road. However, real-time gaze tracking that includes a combination of head pose and eye gaze direction is challenging in the vehicular environment due to (1) different height and facial features of drivers making it difficult to calibrate a camera device for the head pose and gaze direction, (2) unknown illumination conditions leading to unreliable detection of the facial features and (3) abrupt changes in the driver's head pose being difficult to track in video streams contained in image data captured by the camera device.